What Did I Really Learn in China?

A friend I made in my last few days in China.

I’ve left China and I’m starting to sort through the boxes and boxes of memories and lessons and impressions. This box of memories, that box of lessons learned, this jar of lessons learned, that box of memories and lessons learned mixed together, and the dust of impressions scattered over the top of all of them. Ziploc bags of lessons learned. Ancient shopping bag of lessons learned from last year – how do I even still have that bag?

What did I really learn about China? Can I really say I know anything? It’s not hard to know more than most people about China. Read one decent, scholarly book and you know more than most people know about China. To be in the best position to understand China most currently, you need a position that lets you come and go, months at a time in each place, in and out of China so you can test, pause reflect, sort it all out.

What I Have Experienced

I’ve traveled around China: Northeast, Northwest, Southwest, some bits of the middle, some bits of the coast. Listing it all would take a lot. Yet, there are major places I never visited: Guangzhou, Xi’an (no terracotta warriors for me), Tibet, Hangzhou (someone tell Jack Ma I said hi), Xiamen … even places I did go, I could have learned more about them. I went to Shanghai three times, but I didn’t really get out much when I was there.

When I learned Chinese, I did have a systematic foundation. I took one college class at the end of high school and patched up what I learned through language exchange down the years. If you present me a Chinese character I’ve never seen before, I can make a decent go of copying it. Yet, I was never fully conversational. In English I’m not great at small talk. In Chinese I can be ok at small talk because it’s the only thing I can do. My restaurant Chinese is impressive to those who don’t know any because, through repeated interactions, I refined a decent set of tools to get what I wanted.

I worked in China for seven years. I didn’t go out and make a ton of Chinese friends, though I’ve been to Chinese homes for some holidays. Some men strike up a relationship with a Chinese girlfriend. I did not. Romantic relationships give you a core sample of the culture you’re seeing – you meet the family, you interact with society as a unit larger than yourself, you get to see some cultural reference points in close relationships, and you get an up close and personal consultant on cultural matters. It just never happened for me.

What I’ve Read

I’ve read a lot about China. I don’t know where to begin with that reading list. Some of it is straight history of China, some of it is American military history including the Chinese side of a conflict. Yet in reading, you have to choose your books carefully so you can triangulate a good perspective. You have to move between different authors, angles, and philosophies to get the best set of stuff to look at.

One book that has been especially paradigmatic for me is Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945 by Barbara Tuchman. Through the life and experience of General Joseph Stilwell, we get to see the transformation of China from the end of the imperial era to just before the founding of the People’s Republic of China. From the vantage point of a chief agent of American efforts to influence China, we see exactly how well it all worked out – that is, not at all. America and the West left all sorts of material artifacts and procedures and practices for China to pick up and use, but they took what they wanted, left what they didn’t want or didn’t know how to use.

This line from the very end of the book has stuck with me:

In great things, wrote Erasmus, it is enough to have tried. Stilwell’s mission was America’s supreme try in China. He made the maximum effort because his temperament permitted no less; he never slackened and he never gave up. Yet the mission failed in its ultimate purpose because the goal was unachievable. The impulse was not Chinese. Combat efficiency and the offensive spirit, like the Christianity and democracy offered by missionaries and foreign advisers, were not indigenous demands of the society and culture to which they were brought. Even the Yellow River Road that Stilwell built in 1921 had disappeared twelve years later. China was a problem for which there was no American solution. The American effort to sustain the status quo could not supply an outworn government with strength and stability or popular support. It could not hold up a husk nor long delay the cyclical passing of the mandate of heaven. In the end China went her own way as if the Americans had never come.

It's a solid paragraph but it’s worth every bit of it.

I Guess I Did Learn Something

Let me cut through false modesty, awkward self-realization, and a place from which I don’t know how to transition with a fire axe and get right to the end. I do know something about China. I know quite a lot, actually. What that’s supposed to mean to you, I don’t know. Whatever I can offer to you that satisfies your own need to know, whatever can shore up your own quest to understand what it means to be a human being, whatever can give you examples of why we do what we do – that makes it exportable.

Now I need to take the time to sort it all out and refine it. I remember my drama teacher in high school, casting a hard eye upon the class clowns (we had a full clown car of them, as you would expect in a drama class), spoke of the difference between raw talent and, like, you know, actually practicing. I’m going to take my raw experience and refine it into something worthwhile for your consumption. That’s how this goes.

Stay tuned.